poets have of calling their mistress domina, which is more noteworthy, for they call no man dominus. One does not trace the idea at all in Latin comedy, where the heroines are for the most part only too thankful to be caressed and protected. One finds the word in Lucilius, but even in Catullus it is hardly established.”
Instances of gallant behaviour are not rare in Ovid’s poetry; but the didactic tone in which they are detailed makes it almost appear as if the poet were recommending to his countrymen the value of a nice little discovery of his own which would convert crude love-making into a fine art. Never be so ungallant—he says in effect, though he does not use the word—as to refer to a woman’s faults or shortcomings. Compliment her, on the contrary, on her good points—her face, her hair, her tapering fingers, her pretty foot. At the circus applaud whatever she applauds. Adjust her cushion, put the footstool where it ought to be, and keep her comfortable by fanning her. And at dinner, when she has tasted the wine, quickly seize the cup and put your lips to the place where she has sipped.
Unfortunately this morning dawn of Romantic Love, as depicted in the pages of Ovid, was soon hidden beneath the dark clouds of mediæval barbarism, not to emerge again till a thousand years later.
MEDIÆVAL LOVE
CELIBACY VERSUS MARRIAGE
Were I asked to name the four most refining influences in modern civilisation I would answer: Women, Beauty, Love, and Marriage. Were I asked to name the essence of the early mediæval spirit I would say: Deadly Enmity toward Women, Beauty, Love, and Marriage.
This pathologic attitude of the mediæval mind was at first a natural reaction against the incredible depravity and licentiousness that prevailed under the Roman Empire. But the reaction went to such preposterous extremes that the resulting state of affairs was even more degrading and deplorable than the original evil. It was like inoculating a man with leprosy to cure him of smallpox. It was bad enough to treat marriage as a farce, as did the later Romans, among whom there were women who had their eighth and tenth husband, while one case is related of a woman “who was married to her twenty-third husband, she herself being his twenty-first wife”; while the public looked upon this case as a “match” in a double sense, the survivor being publicly crowned and feted as champion. But a thousand times worse was the mediæval notion that marriage is a crime. And this preposterous notion—that a relation on which all civilisation is based, which is sanctioned even by many animals and ignored by only the very lowest of the savages—this criminal notion was foisted on the world by the fanatical priesthood in whose hands unfortunately Christianity was placed for centuries, to be distorted, vitiated, and utilised for political, criminal, and selfish purposes.
“The services rendered,” says Mr. Lecky, “by the ascetics in imprinting on the minds of men a profound and enduring conviction of the importance of chastity, though extremely great, were seriously counterbalanced by their noxious influence upon marriage. Two or three beautiful descriptions of this institution have been culled out of the immense mass of patristic writings; but in general it would be difficult to conceive anything more coarse and more repulsive than the manner in which they regarded it. … The tender love which it elicits, the holy and beautiful domestic qualities that follow in its train, were almost absolutely omitted from consideration. The object of the ascetic was to attract men to a life of virginity, and, as a necessary consequence, marriage was treated as an inferior state.”
“The days of Chivalry were not yet,” we read in Smith’s Dictionary of Christian Antiquities, “and we cannot but notice even in the greatest of the Christian fathers a lamentably low estimate of woman, and, consequently, of the marriage relationship.”
What an inexhaustible source of mediæval immorality this contemptuous treatment of marriage by the most influential class of society proved, has been so often depicted in glaring colours that these pages need not be tainted with illustrations.
WOMAN’S LOWEST DEGRADATION
Woman was represented by the Fathers “as the door of hell, as the mother of all human ills. She should be ashamed at the very thought that she is a woman; she should live in continual penance on account of the curses she has brought upon the world. Women were even forbidden by a provincial council in the sixth century, on account of their impurity, to receive the Eucharist into their naked hands. Their essentially subordinate position was continually maintained” (Lecky).
Not even the Koran took such a degrading view of woman as these early “Christian Fathers.” For the current notion that the existence of a soul in woman is denied by the Mahometan faith is contradicted by several passages in the Koran.
The lowest depths of feminine degradation and the sublimest heights of fanatical folly and crime, however, were not reached in this early period, but some centuries later, when the incredible brutalities of the witchcraft trials began. The vast majority of the victims were women; and Professor Scherr, in his Geschichte der Deutschen Frauenwelt, estimates that in Germany alone at least one hundred thousand “witches” were burnt at the stake. No one on reading the accounts of these trials can help feeling that Shakspere made a mistake when he wrote that
“All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players.”
He should have said,
“All the world’s a madhouse,
And all the men are fools and demons.”
More demons than fools, however. Superstition was, indeed, epidemic during the Middle Ages; but those who superintended the witches’ trials—the rulers and the clergy—were not the persons affected by it. If they did execute 100,000 victims in Germany; if they did murder girls of twelve, ten, eight, and even seven years, on the accusation of having borne children whose father was Satan, or of having murdered persons who in some cases were actually present at the trial—the reason of this was not because the authorities believed this cruel nonsense. The real reason is given by Scherr: “The circumstance that the property of those who were burnt at the stake was confiscated, two-thirds of it getting into the hands of the landowner (Grundherr), the other third into those of the judges, clergy, accusers, and executioners, has beyond doubt kindled countless witch-fires. … During the Thirty Years’ War, especially, the trials for witchcraft became a greedily-utilised source of profit to many a country nobleman in reduced circumstances, and no less to bishops, abbots, and councillors, who were in financial straits. Indeed, as early as the sixteenth century, one of the opponents of witches’ trials, Cornelius Loos, justly observed that the whole proceeding was simply ‘a newly-invented alchemy for converting human blood into gold.’ ”
What difference is there between these civilised savages and the Australian who eats his wife when he gets tired of her? Let those who are fond of seeking needles in haystacks search for traces of Romantic Love under such circumstances.
NEGATION OF FEMININE CHOICE
